Dark Benediction

“Hell, why do you think he let them go there, Beeze?” Tremini jeered. “So we’d work our butts off to finish quick, that’s why. Parkeson’s no idiot. If he’d sent them packing for somewhere else, maybe we’d finish, maybe we wouldn’t.”

“Cut the jawing. Somebody run down and get the twist out of that span before she kinks. Relke, start taking up slack.”

Atop the steel truss that supported’ the pendulous insulators, the lineman began jacking up the slack line. He glanced toward the landing site where the ship had been, and it was hard to believe it had ever been there at all. A sudden improbable dream that had come and gone and left nothing behind. Nothing? Well, there was a share of stock…

“Hey, we’re all capitalists!” Relke called.

Benet hooted. “Take your dividends out in trade.”

“Listen, someday they’ll let dames come here again and get married. That’s one piece of community property you better burn first.”

“That d’Annecy dame thought of everything.”

“Listen, that d’Annecy dame is going to force an issue. She’ll clean up, and a lot of guys will throw away small fortunes, but before it’s over, they’ll let women in space again. Now quit jawing, and let’s get to work.”

Relke glanced at the transformer station where he had taken the girl. He tried to remember what she looked like, but he got Fran’s face instead. He tried to transmute the image into Giselle’s, but it stayed Fran. Maybe he hadn’t really seen Giselle at all. Maybe he had looked at her and seen Fran all along, but it had been a poor substitution. It had accomplished one thing, though. He felt sorry for Fran now. He no longer hated her. She had stuck it out a long time before there had been another guy. And it was harder for a wife on Earth than it was for a husband on Luna. She had to starve in the midst of plenty. He had only to deny himself what he couldn’t get anyhow, or even see. She was the little girl with her nose against the bakery window. He was only fasting in the desert. It was easy; it put one beyond temptation. To fast in a banquet hall, one had to be holy. Fran wasn’t holy. Relke doubted he’d want a wife who was holy. It could get damnably dull.

A quick glance at Earth told him it was still in the skyless vault. Maybe she’ll come, if they ever let them come, he thought wistfully. Maybe the guy’ll be a poor substitute, and she’ll figure out who she’s really married to, legal instruments notwithstanding. Maybe… O God, let her come!… women had no business on Luna, but if they didn’t then neither did men, nor Man, who had to be a twosome in order to be recognizably human.

“Damn it, Relke, work that jack!” Joe yelled. “We got to build that line!”

Relke started cranking again, rocking his body to the rhythm of the jack, to the rhythm of echoes of thought. Got to build the line. Damn it, build the line. Got to build the line. Build the damn line. The line was part of a living thing that had to grow. The line was yet another creeping of life across a barrier, a lungfish flopping from pool to pool, an ape trying to walk erect across still another treeless space. Got to build the line. Even when it kills you, got to build the line, the bloody endless line. The lineman labored on in silence. The men were rather quiet that shift.

Vengeance for Nikolai

THE DISTANT THUNDER of the artillery was only faintly audible in the dugout. The girl sat quietly picking at her hands while the colonel spoke. She was only a slip of a girl, all breast and eyes, but there was an intensity about her that made her unmistakably beautiful, and the colonel kept glancing at her sidelong as if his eyes refused to share the impersonal manner of his speech. The light of a single bare bulb glistened in her dark hair and made dark shadows under deep jade eyes already shadowed by weeping. She was listening intently or not at all. She had just lost her child.

“They will not kill you, grazhdanka, if you can get safely past the lines,” said the colonel. He paced slowly in the dugout, his boot heels clicking pleasantly on the concrete while he sucked at a long cigaret holder and milked his thumbs behind his back in solemn thought. “These Americans, you have heard about their women? No, they will not kill you, unless by accident in passing the lines. They may do other things to you—forgive me!—it is war.” He stopped pacing, straddled her shadow, and looked down at her with paternal pity. “Come, you have said nothing, nothing at all. I feel like a swine for asking it of you, but there is no other hope of heating back this attack. And I am ordered to ask you. Do you understand?”

She looked up. Light filled her eyes and danced in them with the moist glittering of a fresh grief already an ancient grief old as Man. “They killed my Nikolai,” she said softly. “Why do you speak to me so? What can it mean? The bombardment—I know nothing—I cannot think of it. Why do you torment me?”